I’m new to functional programming in general and to Elixir in particular but I’m very intrigued and would like to start diving deeper into the language.
I really prefer learning hands-on with some “real world” coding and since there isn’t an extensive interactive tutorial yet I could find, I’m looking towards one of the popular video courses. In particular “Elixir for Programmers” (https://pragdave.me/) and “Take off with Elixir” (https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off-with-elixir/).

I was wondering if I could get some input on how these two compare?

I’m mainly interested in using Elixir in a microservice oriented backend infrastructure, not so much in the Phoenix all-in-one approach.

I’d appreciate any input on your experiences with these two courses and any information on how they might compare.

Hey Tom,
While I cannot compare your two sources, I am rather curious about your planned usage of Elixir. Can you tell us an example of what you are planning to build?

As I understand (and have practiced) them, microservices are usually single-core laser-focused tools that do one thing really quick and rarely are complex projects. As such, languages like Go or Rust or OCaml (or even C++) are usually better suited for those kinds of projects.

The BEAM VM apps, in which Erlang and Elixir live, are usually much better used for more complex applications and services that coordinate / orchestrate a lot of others, and do a lot of work themselves.

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You’re a programmer, so you don’t need spoon feeding with the conventional drivel about “this is an integer.” No. You need to know what’s different, and you want to know quickly.
But you want more. True mastery of Elixir comes from understanding the underlying idioms: functional programming, transformations, concurrency, and application structure. You need to know the tools, such as IEx and mix. And you need to understand the frameworks, such as OTP and Phoenix. This course will get y…

I’ve made about 80 free screencasts for Elixir learners that start from the very basics (assuming you have experience as a programmer with some other language). I’m sure the production values don’t compare to the two courses

On the two resources you linked, the Take off with Elixir one looks fun and I may buy it myself! Usually, I stick to books, though, and found Dave’s Programming Elixir book extremely useful. He was also very generous in offering free upgrades as new versions of the language and book were released.

Take off with Elixir one looks fun and I may buy it myself! Usually, I stick to books, though, and found Dave’s Programming Elixir book extremely useful.

That’s why I was asking, Take off looks like it is an engaging intro to Elixir, but I was wondering if Dave’s might give “better” information on Elixir software design etc.
If I had the time right now I’d just chose both - which is probably what’s gonna happen in the end anyway

Hey dimitarvp!
Thanks for bringing up your concerns regarding this, being completely new to Elixir (and Erlang) I cannot share any first hand experience yet, but from what I’ve read Elixir is not the worst thing to consider for a MS architecture. I will have to do some performance testing on the calculation heavy services, we’ll see how they perform in Elixir vs. Go or Java.